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I recently decided to abandon YOURLS as my shortlink solution, opting instead to handle short URLs entirely within WordPress. This choice is not a reflection on YOURLS–it’s still a great product–but rather was borne from my use case for shortlinks; I concluded that, since I only used them in conjunction with WordPress, an external shortlink service was excessive.

While WordPress has provided a native shortlinks feature since the 3.0 release, it uses query strings rather than pretty permalinks. This means that the shortlink for this post would be https://ethitter.com/?p=6360. It’s not the prettiest URL, nor will many systems cache that request; as a result, each shortlink that’s followed would load all of WordPress just to perform a redirect to the post’s full URL. Unsatisfied with Core’s handling but also unwilling to retain YOURLS, I wrote a small WordPress plugin to address my needs.

Last week, I went a little upgrade-crazy with the VPS that hosts this site. With SPDY 3.1 support in nginx 1.5, I upgraded. I also bumped PHP from 5.4 to 5.5.

The latter change is significant because PHP 5.5 drops support for APC, and I was using APC for both opcode caching at the PHP level and object caching at the WordPress level (thanks to Jaquith’s plugin). Since I’d lost my object cache, I’d also lost my page cache because I was using Batcache. Nice job, Erick.

Almost a year ago, I contributed twosmall changes to Eric Mann’s WordPress Redis Backend plugin. With Redis already running on my VPS for reasons unrelated to WordPress, it seemed an obvious choice over competing persistent caching options.

To better showcase my web development work, I’ve relocated the pages related to my WordPress plugins to http://www.ethitter.com/plugins/. Any future announcements concerning plugin updates and new offerings will be hosted at ethitter.com.

As part of the move, my plugin development feed is now http://feeds.ldmh.us/ETHPluginDev. FeedBurner does not automatically redirect renamed feeds, so please update your reader accordingly. Anyone subscribed by email, however, should continue to receive updates.